Help taking holiday photo with Nikon D90

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26 Mar 2004
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I'm a photo n00b.
I bought myself a Nikon D90 a couple months planning on learning how to use it and leaving it on Auto as backup and still having it take great photos.

Unfortunately that wasn't the case.

I'll deal with one problem at a time.

I was in Turkey and from our hotel balcony we can see the blue mosque. at night with the mosque all lit up I was trying to take a picture of my wife standing on the balcony and the blue mosque in the background.
I took about 40 photos. Every single one, either the wife came out blurred or the mosque came out blurred. Not one good night time picture.
I tried turning lights in the room on and off, with and without flash. After that i was just tinkering blindly with the settings hoping to fluke it but never did.

So what was I doing wrong and what should i be looking to do.
 
Yeah I guess I should have waited to get home where i can post the pictures before asking. so i will do that.

I was thinking focus. I couldn't get it to focus on foreground and background for night shots.
 
Yeah, post the pic.
Really tricky conditions for a beginner though.
Your gonna need a pretty slow shutter speed and high-ish ISO to get the blue mosque in the background to shine through, but this means your likely to get blur from either the subject or the camera shake.

Tripod would have really helped, or something flat to rest the camera on, and a short-ish focal length (to go with the slower shutter speed) to prevent vibration's blurring it even though its on a flat surface.

Im not great tbh, and I'm guessing based on the facts you gave but i would have tried ISO 800 -> 1600, widest aperture possible and a shutter around 1/10th -> 1/20th of a second.
Flash probably still required to light the subject as well.
 
Your problem it was at night....so think it through.

Night = dark

Logic is use the flash. But stop and think....how big a flash do you need to lit that mosque behind your wife which is about a mile away and with a width of a few miles wide. Consider a football stadium using floodlights that needs the national grid power, then think if your flash to light that.

No is the answer.

What do you do then? Well, forget the flash, unless you have a nuclear power station in your pocket and then lights out of your ass that can be triggered to fire off from the sky, then forget it. So no flash is the answer and how do you capture it? Well, the key here is time. You take longer to take that photo, which is the shutter, and you open it for longer. Which will cause blur. Now think....why is it blur? Well....like if you are in a car and look out the window, thhe scenery going by, why are they blur? Because you are moving. Same reason here, you are moving, your hands are moving, so keep it still, you can do that by resting the camera on something or use a tripod.

Now that is how to take the photograph of the background...what about the foreground?

The flash can however lit your wife standing in front of you who is a few feet away.

So, what do you do? You combine the 2.

Apertue priority mode, the flash will lit the foreground and then leave the shutter high enough for the background.
 
Yeah I guess I should have waited to get home where i can post the pictures before asking. so i will do that.

I was thinking focus. I couldn't get it to focus on foreground and background for night shots.

your problem was not focus in itself but Depth of Field/Focus. Trying to get both the mosque and foreground sharp requires a small aperture (try f/13 or f/16) and careful selection of focal distance.

At night time this would definitely require a tripod.
 
The flash can however lit your wife standing in front of you who is a few feet away.

So, what do you do? You combine the 2.

Apertue priority mode, the flash will lit the foreground and then leave the shutter high enough for the background.

But his wife won't be able t be still enough to avoid blurring.


The really is answer is your D90 is faulty. I'll trade you for my D50 :D
 
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